I think I should just keep my stuff packed.

I have moved every year since I graduated from high school. There were eight moves while in undergrad between Sacramento and Irvine, and then after college I moved back up to Sacramento, where I lived for a year and few months. I then decided I wanted to go to Boston for graduate school, so I whittled my stuff down to four ginormous suitcases and headed 3,000 miles away. While in Boston for two years I lived in two different apartments. When grad school was over, I decided that I missed the West Coast, so I packed up my trailer full of boxes (note that I went from four suitcases to a trailer in two short years) and came back to Elk Grove (suburb of Sacramento). After a year and half of living in my current apartment I decided that I wanted to be closer to work, so tomorrow I'm moving downtown. Here's a breakdown:

Sacramento
Irvine (freshman year)
Sacramento
Irvine (sophomore year)
Sacramento
Irvine (junior year)
Sacramento
Irvine (senior year)
Sacramento
Boston (year one of grad school)
Brookine (outside of Boston, year two of grad school)
Elk Grove
Sacramento

That's thirteen moves in eight years. It's the army brat lifestyle with no army. Or brats.

But I don't really mind moving. I love the purging effect that happens when you have to pack up your life into boxes and move it 30 miles or 3,000 miles. I'm not a pack rat, so I don't have boxes of who knows what hiding anywhere (for the record, I do have a few boxes in my mom's garage, but I know what's in them. Mostly. A lot of art supplies from back when I was creative.) I am forced to examine at everything I own and decide if it needs to come with me into the next place. I can take the opportunity to get rid of the clutter and pare down to fifty or sixty boxes of necessities.

Heh.

Tomorrow I start the next chapter in my life. It will be the first time I'm really living on my own with no roommates. Part of me is really excited. Part of me is freaking out. Part of me is glad that I'll have over an hour extra every day since I'm knocking quite a bit of time off my commute. That part of me is the part that likes to sleep in.

Now that I'll be downtown, I hope I can make the best of the opportunities there. I can visit all the art galleries on the second Saturday of the month for free. I can walk to and from the grocery store two blocks away (anyone who lives in California understands the rarity of that last statement). I can visit my few friends who already live on the grid, and I can try to convince my other friends that downtown is where it's at so they'll move there too.

Tomorrow is a big day.